• The Making of Appalachian Mississippi
• Justin Randolph (bio)

Mountains in Mississippi. On this duplication of Rand McNally's 1966 Texaco Touring Atlas, Thompson Pound drew Appalachia to include all of North Mississippi east of the Delta region and an unknown coconspirator drew mountains and valleys where there were none. Senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis submitted this map into the official Congressional Record. This was the forgery that made Appalachian Mississippi. Map from Richard Dunlop, Texaco Touring Atlas by Rand McNally: United States, Canada, Mexico (Chicago: Texaco, 1966), 6–7, from the James O. Eastland Collection, Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries.

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Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

—W. E. B. Du Bois, 1920

in 1966, a retired high school principal named George Thompson Pound reached for his Rand McNally atlas. He turned to page six, took a pen, and drew off Appalachia. Starting in West Virginia, he marked along the Blue Ridge Mountains, through the Carolinas, northwest Georgia, and east Alabama.

But Pound kept going. He marked past the clear end of mountainous terrain around Birmingham, Alabama, and passed into North Mississippi—his home. With the stroke of a pen, Pound boldly reimagined geography and race in one of America's most notorious Jim Crow states. He fused the imaginative work of region-making and mapmaking into a lasting political reality for the land and its people.

Pound made his map for Mississippi's governor and congressional delegation. These political elites, segregationists like US senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis, hoped the federal government would include northeast Mississippi in its new Appalachian Regional Commission (arc), a Great Society program that eventually distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments.¹

This movement to invent what segregationists called "Appalachian Mississippi" countered the War on Poverty's economic empowerment of rural Black communities. Since 1964, the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo) had poured federal funding directly into Mississippi's Black freedom struggle through institutions for public housing, cooperative agriculture, and childcare, such as Project Head Start. The arc model bypassed the oeo's mandate for the "maximum feasible participation" of local beneficiaries in the use of poverty funds. Ruling [End Page 91] whites had resisted the War on Poverty's direct redistribution from the beginning, but their reimagining of southern Appalachia was a watershed. The arc promised continued white control of federal monies and further undermined the oeo's unmediated funding of Black communities. It imagined, in short, a path around democracy.²

There was just one problem: Mississippi lacked mountains. It was right there on Pound's map. Mississippi sat in the coastal plain, the same shade of gray as West Tennessee or East Texas. Undeterred, an unknown conspirator merely took a fine-point pen and changed the map. They drew ridges and valleys where there were none. They blended the mountains of Alabama and Tennessee into the Cotton Belt. At arm's length, this new map showed Mississippi as the western terminus of the Appalachian chain. And when Pound and southern Democrats made their case before Congress in 1967, they submitted this map as evidence. This was the forgery that made Appalachian Mississippi.

But it took much more than a map to wipe away histories of plantation slavery and share-cropping from a region long recognized as the Black Belt. The process by which twenty-four Mississippi counties became Appalachia is a history of arbitrary power and the boundlessness of white supremacist imagination. When white elites dreamt up a new historical geography for North Mississippi, they envisioned a place without a Black past. They also theorized a new white identity after Jim Crow, a new whiteness deserving of federal largesse for top-down modernizing projects like airports and industrial parks. In creating a new world (past and present) in which to reassert their artificial hierarchy, they proved W. E. B. Du Bois's assertion that whiteness conferred ownership; in this case, the right to make and remake landscapes in the same way that white identities could be made and remade after fundamental challenges to white supremacist racial order.^3...

• 阿巴拉契亚密西西比州的制作
• 贾斯汀·兰道夫（生物学）

在密西西比州的山脉。在与兰德·麦克纳利（Rand McNally）的1966年《德士古巡回赛地图集》（Texaco Touring Atlas）的重复中，汤普森·庞德（Thompson Pound）吸引了阿巴拉契亚（Appalachia），将整个北密西西比州包括在三角洲地区以东，而一个不知名的同谋者则在没有山峰和山谷的地方画了画。参议员James O. Eastland和John C. Stennis将此地图提交了正式的国会记录。这就是使阿巴拉契亚密西西比州成为伪造品。兰德·麦克纳利（Rand McNally）的《得克萨斯州旅行地图集》（Rex McNally）的理查德·邓洛普（Richard Dunlop）的地图，美国密西西比大学图书馆的詹姆斯·O·伊斯特兰（James O. Eastland）特别收藏，美国，加拿大，墨西哥（芝加哥：德士古，1966年）。

[完第90页]

洁白是地球永远的所有权，阿们！

-杜波依斯（WEB Du Bois），1920年

1966年，一位名叫乔治·汤普森·庞德（George Thompson Pound）的退休高中校长拿到了兰德·麦克纳利地图集。他翻到第六页，握笔，然后抽离阿巴拉契亚。从西弗吉尼亚州开始，他沿着蓝岭山脉，卡罗来纳州，乔治亚州西北部和阿拉巴马州东部进行了标记。

但是庞德继续前进。他划过阿拉巴马州伯明翰周围多山的尽头，然后进入了他家的北密西西比州。庞德用笔抚摸大胆地重新构想了美国最臭名昭著的吉姆·克劳州之一的地理和种族。他将区域制作和制图的富有想象力的工作融合到土地和人民的持久政治现实中。

庞德为密西西比州州长和国会代表团绘制了地图。这些政治精英，例如美国参议员James O. Eastland和John C. Stennis等种族隔离主义者，希望联邦政府将密西西比东北部纳入其新的阿巴拉契亚地区委员会（arc）中，这是一个伟大的社会计划，最终向当地政府分配了数亿美元政府。^1个

这项发明种族隔离运动称为“阿巴拉契亚密西西比”的运动反击了“反贫困战争”赋予农村黑人社区的经济权力。自1964年以来，经济机会办公室（oeo）通过公共住房，合作农业和儿童保育机构（如Project Head Start），将联邦资金直接投入了密西西比州的黑人自由斗争。该弧模式绕开了OEO的任务为当地受益人在使用扶贫资金的“最大可能参与”。统治[完第91页]白人从一开始就抵制贫困战争的直接重新分配，但是他们对阿巴拉契亚南部的重新想象是一个分水岭。该圆弧承诺继续对联邦政府的款项实行白人控制，并进一步削弱了OEO对黑人社区的无中介资助。简而言之，它构想出一条围绕民主的道路。^2个

只有一个问题：密西西比州没有山。就在磅地图上。密西西比州坐在沿海平原，与西田纳西州或东德克萨斯州相同的灰色阴影。不为所动的是，一个不知名的阴谋家仅仅拿了一支细笔，就改变了地图。他们画了没有的山脊和山谷。他们将阿拉巴马州和田纳西州的山脉融合到棉带中。这张新地图一臂之力，显示密西西比州是阿巴拉契亚链的西端。当庞德和南方民主党人在1967年向国会提出诉讼时，他们提交了这张地图作为证据。这就是使阿巴拉契亚密西西比州成为伪造品。

但是，要消除一个长期被称为黑带地区的种植园奴隶制和农作物种植的历史，就需要用一张地图来完成。二十四个密西西比州县成为阿巴拉契亚州的过程是任意权力的历史，也是白人至上主义者的无边无际的历史。当白人精英们为北密西西比州梦想着一个新的历史地理时，他们设想了一个没有黑人过去的地方。他们还在吉姆·克罗（Jim Crow）之后提出了一种新的白人身份理论，一种新的白人身份值得联邦政府慷慨地用于自上而下的现代化项目，例如机场和工业园区。在创建一个新世界（过去和现在）以重新确立其人为的等级制度时，他们证明了WEB Du Bois的断言：白色赋予所有权；在这种情况下，^{3 ...}